“Migrants from poor countries send home about $300 billion a year. This is more than three times the global total in foreign aid, making ‘remittances’ the main source of outside money flowing to the developing world “(New York Times Week in Review, November 18th, 2007).

The Mouride Brotherhood is a West African Sufi order of Islam based in the holy city of Touba, Senegal. Adherents have lived and traded in urban enclaves on every continent for much of the past fifty years. But I first came to understand some of the complexity of the Brotherhood’s commercial and financial network in a studio course I taught last year, Remittances: Global New York. The studio examined the pathways, institutions, and built products of the informal global trade in money. It asked the question: how is the movement of money manifested, and in what forms, in urban centers worldwide? New York City was our laboratory for experiments with this phenomenon, and students investigated two sites in Jackson Heights, Queens and one in Harlem, the stretch of West 116th Street that some call Little Senegal.

At first glance, the streetscape of Little Senegal reads as a typical ethnic enclave in New York. By looking closely beneath the surface of storefronts and street vendors, architecture student Anna Maria Bogadóttir discovered a global trade and remittance system that includes millions of $200 transactions, itinerant merchants moving from Hong Kong to Jeddah to New York to Paris, and the transnational financial flows that have funded the urban development of Touba.

This week Urban Omnibus presents the beginnings of Bogadóttir’s discovery process and invites readers to dig into the literature that reveals the complex relationship between this neighborhood, a global religious and financial network, and the urban development of a large African city of which too few of us are aware. This presentation, like the surfaces of New York’s streets that we walk by every day and take for granted, is only the start of the story. Look closer.

Detailed inspection of our urban fabric, and the financial systems that undergird it, challenges the common presumption that the Global North, or developed world, establishes institutions that dominate the Global South, or developing world. This studio documented and responded to the reverse trend, in which the developing world establishes new patterns in its host cities, dollar by dollar, person by person, often in ad hoc, makeshift, and opaque ways.  The result is a massive, still growing, dynamic global network of physical, communication, and institutional spaces.

Architects and urbanists need to recognize the spatial definition of these patterns: what do they look like now?  What materials, networks, technologies and programs inform or build each pattern? How does the informal city embed itself in the formal city? How do the informal and the formal cities transform one another? And what might each look like in the future?

– Laura Kurgan

For a thorough overview of worldwide remittance flows, check out the research and website of the International Fund for Agricultural Develoment (IFAD).

For press coverage of how remittances affect the global economy and how individuals are constantly reinventing this often informal framework, start here:

Western Union moves Migrant Cash Home, The New York Times, November 22, 2007

Interactive map illustrating the dispersal of remittance funds throughout the world, The New York Times, Week in Review, November 17, 2007

Immigrants push Western Union to share the wealth, in The Nation, May 11 2007.

The Million Dollar Club Project, an initiative to bolster the economic agency of remittance senders.

These scholarly sources offer an introduction to the Mouride Brotherhood and the holy city of Touba.

A sociological analysis of how the Mouride Brotherhood addresses globalization:
Diouf, Mamadou; Translated by Steven Rendall. “The The Senegalese Murid Trade Diaspora and the Making of a Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.” Public Culture – Volume 12, Number 3, Fall 2000, pp. 679-702

An examination of commercial strategies employed by Mouride business people:
Ebin, Victoria. “À la recherche de nouveaux ‘poissons’: stratégies commerciales mourides par temps de crise”, Politique africaine 45, 1992, pp. 86-99.

A book-length account that links global and local elements of the experience of West African street merchants in New York City:
Paul Stoller. Money Has No Smell: The Africanization of New York City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

How urban design in Touba reflects its position as the center of the Mouride Brotherhood:
Ross, Eric. Sufi City: Urban Design and Archetypes in Touba. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006.

(Most of the Sufi shrines discussed in this book can be viewed in high-resolution satellite images by downloading this Google Earth file)

How Sufi brotherhoods shape the practice of Islam in Senegal
Mbacké, Khadim; Translated by Eric Ross and edited by John Hunwick. Sufism and Religious Brotherhoods in Senegal. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2005.

Anna María Bogadóttir is a candidate in the Master’s of Architecture Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

Laura Kurgan teaches architecture at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she is Director of Visual Studies and the Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL).

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.